


Nothing with nothing

by Lilliburlero



Category: King Rat - James Clavell
Genre: Closeted Character, F/M, Ireland, POV First Person, Period Typical Attitudes, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 20:29:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12540548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Peter and Sean, on leave before they ship out to Java.*Note: mentions of painful and violent death, discussion of human remains.





	Nothing with nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



> for disenchanted, who prompted 'Peter Marlowe and Sean Jennison, on the edge of consciousness.'

Peter can’t stay awake after he’s had his. I didn’t know that before this leave, before we came away together, it always had to be so hole-and-corner. Funny that Margate should mean freedom. Margate! _I can connect / Nothing with nothing_. I never read that in a positive way before, but now I can see that it might be a good thing, being able to connect one nothing to another. The nothing that is me to the nowhere that is Margate, this shabby boarding-house with its bossy notices about the blackout and the lavatory chain and the hot water and guests must vacate between the hours of. Peter isn’t nothing, he’s something. He’s really something, as the Yanks say. But he’s barely out of me before his eyelids are fluttering shut.

Not that he’s selfish. He always tries to hold back until I’ve finished too, doesn’t always manage it. It doesn’t make much difference. Either way, I want to talk, and either way, I mustn’t. It’s all for the best. This way I can tell him, and yet never let anything slip. His face doesn’t go flabby in sleep like some people’s, the cranial structure’s too good, but all the something, all the Peter, empties out of it, and he looks like a monument, to the Unknown Flight Lieutenant. A cenotaph: there’s rarely very much left when someone buys it. You become one with your kite, and they put sandbags in the coffin, if there’s a coffin at all. I mouth the words over his closed eyes and parted lips. Peter, my name’s Eilish. I’m a girl, and my name’s Eilish. 

The original Eilish was the girl I wanted to be when it all fell into place. She wasn’t the first, looking back on it, but she became the only. That’s why I named myself after her. She was my mother’s first cousin’s granddaughter. That’s closer than it sounds, in an Irish family, higgledy-piggledy like the townhouses along the quays in Fermoy, which was where Mammy was from, East Cork, and we went back for three weeks every summer. We children said ‘go back to Fermoy’ like Mammy did, though there wasn’t any back about it for us, we were all born in England. Dad said ‘go on holiday to Ireland,’ and he was out of place in Auntie Maureen’s house above the little shop on Ashe Quay, but he didn’t mind too much because he could go salmon fishing in the Blackwater with the other Englishmen, who were there ‘on holiday’ too. 

The phrase you heard around Eilish was ‘for a girl.’ Bright, tall, strong, athletic, _for a girl_. That, you were given to understand, was a pity for her. If she’d been a boy she could have been something important: a priest or a champion hurler. But it wasn’t a pity for me, it was a joy. You could be interested in the things I was interested in and do the things I wanted to do and still be a girl: you could swim and build rafts that sank and cycle as far as Galtymore beyond Michelstown and back before supper, and pore for hours over the _Aircraft Year Book for 1929_ that Dinny Byrne had brought back from America and given to your brother except your brother wasn’t interested in anything you couldn’t hit with a hurley. I trailed around after her like a moorhen chick after its mother. Dad made jokes about puppy love, and everyone else in the room frowned in the way that meant they knew he was from the nation that produced the _News of the World_ and such, pure out filth altogether, and sure what could you expect? We were Gaels, clean-minded beyond the ways of men, and Eilish’s father was a famous Republican who died in the Battle for Cork, becoming one with his cot as the makeshift barracks above the Anglo-Irish Bank burned, and his cortège, with its ballast-filled coffin, passed Michael Collins’s on its way to Cobh. 

And then the summer I was thirteen we went back to Fermoy but Eilish wasn’t there. She’d left school and gone to train as a nurse in Bristol. I wanted to cry because no-one had told me beforehand, but when that had worn off I felt strangely hopeful, as if somehow, now she was gone, I could take her place. That was the summer I outgrew two pairs of tennis shoes and my voice started to waver and coarsen. I spent a lot of time mooching in the shady walks down Barnane. Everything was assuming a wrong shape, but I had my name at least, and I held it precious in the empty space that was supposed to be me. _Is mise Eilís_ , said the breeze in the sycamores and birches and willows, _Is mise Eilís_. 

I whisper it now, _Is cailín me, Eilís is ainm dom, is mise Eilís_ , and Peter’s eyes snap open, blue and lightly clouded like the sky above the sycamores and birches and willows down Barnane. The shadows are growing, washing over the yellowing walls of the room as the sea washes over the sands beyond it, but Peter’s face is still bright, bathed in the fading sunlight. 

He starts in alarm, giving a short shout, then falls back in recognition. ‘Christ, Sean. I didn’t know who you were for a sec.’ He blinks. ‘I must have been out for the count.’ 

‘Dead to the world.’ I grin, hoping I don’t look too wan. 

He grabs the nape of my neck and pulls me down into a kiss. I can feel him getting hard through the sheet, and he groans, turning his head away to one side. ‘Ooof―that, eugh. I mean, I’m not sure I―’ 

‘It’s all right.’ I scramble back on the lumpy bed and perch on the end of it. He props himself up on his elbows. 

‘We’d better go out.' I say. 'Mrs Pargeter will get suspicious. Red-blooded RAF types, _not_ down at the Dreamland Ballroom fighting off girls with a mucky stick, something queer there and no mistake…’ 

A faint exasperation flits across his face, but it relents into a smile. 

‘Dammit,’ he says. ‘Let’s go and have a pint or two of old Blighty before―’ 

We report at Southampton tomorrow evening, to ship out on Monday. I still haven’t acquired a taste for beer. 

‘Yes, all right. I don’t suppose there’s mild and old and bitter in Java. Thank God.’ 

Peter’s laughs are to die for, warm, embracing, infectious. He twists over to reach for his shirt. ‘Somehow, my dear,’ he says in an especially fluting public school accent, ‘I think that’s going to be the least of our worries.’

**Author's Note:**

> The Battle for Cork was a decisive victory for the Free State in the Irish Civil War. Michael Collins was the Commander-in-Chief of the Free State Army; that his cortège politely passed and made way for that of an ordinary Republican soldier on the Western Road in Cork is a matter of fact, unlikely as it may seem.
> 
>  _Is cailín me, Eilís is ainm dom, is mise Eilís_ : I'm a girl, Eilish is my name, I'm Eilish.


End file.
